Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to the transmission of wireless signals to user equipments and in particular to signaling steps that allow user equipments to access to the wireless signals.
It finds application, in particular while not exclusively, in offloading broadcast services from a cellular network, such as an LTE mobile network, in particular LTE-Advanced, which is initially dedicated to unicast services, to an existing broadcast network.
It aims in particular at relieving mobile networks by offloading broadcast contents, such as video contents, to existing High Tower, High Power (HTHP) transmitters of broadcast networks. This system is hereafter called Tower Overlay over LTE-Advanced, TOoL+.
Description of the Related Art
LTE-Advanced describes the latest evolution of cellular transmission standards developed by the 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Projet).
A broadcast/multicast service named eMBMS, for “evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service”, is integrated into LTE-A mobile networks.
Only up to 60% of the available LTE-A resources can be reserved for eMBMS services. Therefore, existing solutions propose to operate eMBMS together with unicast services on a regular LTE-A carrier supported by a cellular network, as eMBMS is only specified in a so called “mixed mode”.
In contrast to cellular networks, traditional HTHP terrestrial broadcast networks offer a low cost alternative to cover wide areas with broadcast and multicast services.
To enable these much larger coverage areas, TOoL+ however requires signaling to permit a user equipment to access the broadcast services provided by the HTHP networks.